Many of you may be too young to recall the good ol’ days of how video game companies often had to work around hardware limitations or other constraints to bring you your digital entertainment. One of the earliest I can recall is the old Pac-Man game for the Atari 2600. With 4k to work with, being able to render Pac-Man and four ghosts seemed a nigh impossible task, but someone figured out that making the ghosts flicker (I mean, hey, they’re ghosts) would allow the game to appear to display multiple foes for our dot (or in this case, wafer) eating protagonist to face.

Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine is probably the closest thing to this sort of coding conundrum in existence today. It and its variants are used to run the Elder Scrolls games as well as Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and that similarity is what has allowed the various mods made for these games to be ported from one to the other fairly easily. It runs on both consoles and PCs, and as it’s a bit of a tar ball, the engine has given us a lot of hilarious bugs.

Given that this is a 3D engine that’s pretty much designed for first-person shooter role-playing games, occasionally, the engine needs to be wrangled a bit to give you the experience desired by the coders. Hence, the trickery used to create Fallout 3‘s Presidential Metro. All that’s needed is that you “see” the metro around you. Your arm is suddenly trransformed into the whole subway interior, and “you” are forced to run at a ludicrous speed for a few seconds to simulate the ride. Once that’s over, your arm pops back to normal, and you proceed.

It’s similar to the popular XRE-Cars mod for New Vegas, where your character model is basically transformed from a humanoid shape into that of a car while it’s active. It’s not what one would want if a magic wand and a wish for driveable vehicles was made, but within the limitations of the engine (which, don’t forget, had to run on previous-gen consoles), it’s a pretty good trick.

The slide shows in Bethesda’s Fallout games are accomplished with another in-engine illusion. You, at home, see photos go by with narration and music telling you the backstory to the Capital/Mojave Wasteland. Inside the game, your avatar is immobilized in a dark room, forced to face a curtain, A Clockwork Orange-style, while someone tells you about what you’re seeing. In order for your avatar (and therefore you) to “hear” the speech, an NPC has to be in the vicinity to speak to you, so the game puts one behind the curtain, out of sight, to deliver the narration. In New Vegas, this is accomplished by a character called “Ron the Narrator,” named for the game’s main storyteller, Ron Perlman. There’s also a mission from Fallout 3‘s “Point Lookout” DLC that requires a character speak with you telepathically, so the game puts an NPC inside an unreachable building to be the source of the voice tracks (though in this case, they forgot to make this NPC not show up on your HUD’s radar).

I rather like it when games are forced to try new ways of doing things to squeeze better performance and new behaviors out of limited resources. Consoles, for better or for worse, help to make this happen, as game companies try to make better-looking games run on devices that aren’t going to be upgraded for several years. I mean, look at the original graphics for Oblivion and the ones for Skyrim. Remember, those were both coded for the XBox 360, and what a difference a few years can make.

Also, I hope I’m not the only one who saw the image above and thought of the superhero created by “The Frantics” named Mr. Canoehead. If I am, I can accept it, and take it as an opportunity to relive my youth when pop culture was something that happened to other people…

Let me premise this gameplay thingie from Fallout 4 by warning younger and/or more sensitive readers that there’s a lot of violence in this. If you’ve played the previous games, there are sequences that show off what the “bloody mess” perk is probably going to do for you. So if that’s cool with you, here’s some gameplay from the upcoming time-sink, Fallout 4. Some of this has been shown before in other Bethesda presentations, but there’s some new bits to see:

The “laser musket” makes me think that Boston is kind of an historical theme park. Coupled with the presence of androids, or “synths,” and I’m reminded a bit of the movie Westworld, as well as several episodes of Doctor Who and possibly Star Trek; Basically, anywhere that weapons are made to look like something rather than sticking to functionality. The NPCs look a lot more natural when they’re talking to you, though we’ll have to see if this Mass Effect-ish mode of conversation works for Fallout.

Now I want to go listen to (language/violence warning) Atom Bomb Baby again.

As a closing note, there’s still a bit of “Fallout 3 vs. New Vegas” contention going on in various quarters, and I think that this article about the game series captures why Fallout 3 inspires so much love in spite of having a substandard main plot, less NPC interaction, and fewer choices that affect the game world. Fallout 3 visually and viscerally captures the look and feel of that The Day After by way of Gamma World vibe that a lot of us grew up on. Trying to present the paranoia of the Cold War is another thing it did well, and it’s something a lot of nitpickers seem to forget. They’ll complain about why there are guns everywhere, robots default to killing trespassers, and some factions are so set on killing outsiders they’ll do so to their own detriment. They need to go watch Doctor Strangelove again, or look at most espionage films from the era. Maybe if they thought of it like the modern-day zombie apocalypse fiction but swap in Soviet-style communists for the living dead?

The trailer for the DC movie, Suicide Squad has been put out for public consumption. It’s actually fairly non-violent given the characters in it, and if nothing else, Amanda Waller sounds like the best kind of Amanda Waller (the one from Justice League Unlimited):

Ben Affleck will be making a cameo as Batman, so they’re really trying this whole crossover thing that Marvel has been doing so well. Props for that, but I’d still feel more optimistic if DC’s movies had more planning behind them. I’m not sold on Jared Leto’s Joker, as the whole metal-teeth-‘n’-tattoos thing doesn’t seem like the character from the comic books. Joker’s look was always rooted in some form of trauma (being dipped in chemicals by Batman, usually) rather than something he’d intentionally done to himself. Still, the proof will be in the performance. I’m also not entirely sure how someone like the Joker would obtain a Joker-mobile, but maybe it was “payment” for working with Waller?

I hope it works out for DC, and not just commercially, since a movie that’s not terribly good can still make boatloads of cash (e.g. Superman Returns). If not, I wouldn’t mind if they went back to putting out their animated offerings, since those were (and still are) my favorite superhero cartoons thus far.

The San Diego Comic Con rolls on, and a promo reel for Star Wars: The Force Awakens was shown to attendees, then shared on the Tube of You:

In addition to actual sets, we’re getting practical effects, animatronics, and the use of film stock along with modern CGI. There’s also people running, a rare sight in Episodes I-III due to most of the movie being shot on small, green-colored soundstages. I also eagerly await the first Stormtrooper cosplayers to figure out how to make a “working” flamethrower that doesn’t result in a detention at the airport or the entrance to the convention center. Also I’m pretty amazed at the crash-landed TIE fighter, in that from what I’ve read about their construction, having one not explode after coming in contact with a cloud is a sign it wasn’t built on a Friday before happy hour.

Snarking aside, I hope the story measures up to the apparent love and craft being brought to bear on the “feel” of the movie. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

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Not the greatest catchphrase ever, but that’s what they (nearly) ended this trailer for Doctor Who‘s 9th series (since 2005). The only real spoilers consist of a recurring villain, an alien race we haven’t seen in a while, the show isn’t finished using something resembling the undead, and they still have those orange space suits in the BBC wardrobe. Also, I think Peter Capaldi’s hair is fluffier:

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If you’re like me (and I know I am), you couldn’t make it to San Diego this year for the convention whose growth will likely only be limited by how many people the local atmosphere can provide enough oxygen to. Since we can’t all be there, those special chosen ones (people with hotel reservations) are uploading lots of images that we can pretend we took while we were strolling through the main hall. Here’s more than 130 ‘memories’ to cherish.

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This one’s all about movies, TV, and anything where someone is presenting something to occupy your eyeballs. We’ll jump right in with happenings on the musical stage:

• Songs will be in the key of M in James Bond, the Musical! I can see someone topping the injury roster from Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark with this one, and I’m not sure how audiences will react if someone actually puts lyrics to the James Bond theme.

• The guys behind The Lego Movie will be in charge of an upcoming Han Solo movie. I loves me some Solo, but I’m not sure this is really necessary. Whenever I read any Han Solo Star Wars novels, I spend most of my time thinking how I already know how his story will eventually end (until the next actual Star Wars movie comes out). Yeah, I know, no main character ever really dies anyway, but I also know nothing will happen to his ship or to any friends who show up in the movies, etc.

• Want to see a bunch of photos of the models and minis from Blade Runner? Of course you do! If you want to skip the article and its background info, you can just jump to the Imgur gallery here.

• And it’s official, Harry Shearer won’t be leaving The Simpsons for at least two more seasons. I was kind of hoping they’d have to do something creative like have half the town of Springfield come down with random laryngitis or something.

At Inconjunction, “The Future is Now!” Also, the future was influenced a bit by the latest trailers for Fallout 4, and here’s the result:
I believe that’s my first Atompunk design, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Also, occasionally I get one of those ideas that kind of “happens” and it turns out cooler than I thought. Such was the case with the ad that’s on the back of their guidebook for Inconjunction 2016. The logo was mostly thanks to the fact that the internet has loads of “famous” fonts available for abuse:
If there are any other aspiring sci-fi desginers out there, it’s always good to remember that our tax dollars paid for things like the Hubble Space Telescope, so the lovely high-res stuff from their image gallery is usable free of charge, though they’d like an image credit if you’re so inclined.

And to those who have worked on the Hubble, I swear this isn’t what I think the best use of your efforts can be put to; it’s just the best I can do with them.

“Where has Aaron been?” you may be asking, and that’s a very good question. It’s been a cavalcade of time sinks, work stoppages, and general “this again?” in June, and I’m hoping it’s finally over so I can get back to regularly entertaining everyone.

June started off with the aftermath of Memorial Day weekend, which isn’t something one considers a stumbling block to accomplishing stuff, except I hadn’t spent much time with any family in so long I was in danger of being given a wake and declared deceased. This was preceded by my wife’s last week of teaching school for the 2014-2015 year, requiring me to be in charge of our son while she got her classroom ready for summer school use and the heavy-duty scrub down & furniture re-arranging her school does every year.

So back from that, and projects I’d promised that I thought would go quickly turned out to take longer than I’d thought. This is on me, and I know to better budget my time on this kind of thing starting by remembering that I’m, at best, a high school track team member and not The Flash, if you get my metaphor. On the up side, they turned out really well, especially for the Inconjunction convention this weekend. I’ll have some of the pretty cool graphical stuff that came of up here later today.

Then there’s whoever the jerkface was that wrote the malicious code which hijacked the site for a while. Every link caused an ad to pop up, which is a crime that ought to warrant punishments involving clamps, wet willies, and having to watch “Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo” on an endless loop. Thankfully, Drew was able to beat the zeroes and ones here into submission, and I believe we can get back to whatever passes for normal.

But the big whammy came last week when Kansas City got the worst storm-related power outage since an ice storm back in 2002. We had some kind of “wall of microbursts” go whipping through here which gave us winds at around 80 miles per hour. For my house, this resulted in a neighbor’s tree coming down on both the power lines and the one for internet. Among the things I learned this weekend was that the pole that the lines were re-attached to required several decades of foliage overgrowth to be removed, revealing that it had the really old brown glass transformer covers still on it. This isn’t entirely surprising, since the pole is surrounded by the rest of the block (if they’d needed to get a truck back there, several fences would’ve had to come down). Not surprisingly, with the tens of thousands of other outages that affected more than two houses, we were low on the list of priorities when it came to getting the juice turned back on, which is completely understandable.

So now I’m scrambling to get out from the backlog from that, and I’m probably going to sacrifice my 4th of July weekend to do so. This means my Patrons will get another chapter of my novel as well as a new installment of the Audio Log project in a week or so with an all-new setting. Thanks for sticking with me, and hopefully Kansas City will finally erect that storm-proof dome I’ve been bugging City Hall about.